I’m so slow!

Sorry I didn’t mean to make anyone else feel bad about their progress! It’s very subjective, I think, ones rate of progress. I was feeling like personally I was being slow when compared with what WaniKani say on their website - 6000 words in 1 year!

But, after reading everyone’s replies, I realised that there’s a wide range of progress and really whether you are moving fast or slow is entirely up to you.

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Yeah on that note – it’s come up plenty times on the forums before, but that marketing phrase is not great for that very reason. It’s possible but rarely advised. To actually do it in one year you do have to be moving at very close to the maximum speed possible. Don’t pay that part any mind. I still consider myself to be going fast, faster than most people, and it’s still going to take me a little under a year and a half in total.

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I don’t know. I really like the fact I can go through Japanese from Zero and already know a large percent of the vocab words at the beginning of the lesson, so I can just focus on the grammar of the lesson.

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“How do people make it to level 60 in a year? I’m not in a hurry but at this rate It’ll take me 10 years.”

They sacrifice their soul to the almighty crab.

Seriously though to do something like that you either have to do all of your lesions as you get them and maintain a good accuracy while doing your reviews exactly when they become available sun or moon. Or use scrips that reorder everything so you can do the kanji and radicals first and levelling the vocab with the whole accuracy and reviews part aswell.

Don’t try to emulate them. You will either learn to appreciate some of the finer points of the term suffering, or you will just burn out and drop Japanese altogether.

Don’t worry abut being slow. Getting to sixty, while it’ll help with reading alot, it isn’t exactly mandatory. Once you get to level 20 or so you hit the sweet spot where you know alot of the most communally used kanji and can pretty much focus on grammar vocab and reading while slowly doing kanji on the side. I’m only level 14 and I’m seeing alot of the kanji i’ve learned on here in other vocab lists I’m srsing and i’ve learned nearly all the kanji in most n5 and n4 beginner textbooks from here.

You’ve made more progress than you think, keep at it. You’ve learned quite a bit in 5 months.

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i speedran the first 20 levels. all it takes is discipline, copious amounts of free time, and a willingness to warp the rest of your life around the WK schedule…

after that, i had a breakdown, and took a year for the next 5 levels * :sweat_smile:


going fast is relatively easy: doing lessons is your accelerator, doing your reviews punctually your cruise control, and there aren’t any breaks. if you are going to fast you just have to coast until the reviews slow down.

there’s a whole bunch of userscripts which can help you keep organised, you’ll have to check them out and see which ones fit your style.

but yeah, the number of lessons controls how fast you go. if you do 5 per day, WK will take about 5 years. 10, about 2.5 years. if you do 20+, you can reach level 60 in under a year. the amount of work remains approximately the same.


*i’m back on the train though: been doing about 120 reviews per day, and increased lessons to 10

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Correct me if I’m wrong but… Assuming someone only does reviews once a day (but every single day), they would slow down in the early apprentice stages, wouldn’t they?
Let’s say you do all your radical + kanji lessons in a single day, and even do the first review 4 hours later. All good and well. Let’s also just assume that you’d get every single review correct for the sake of argument.
Apprentice 2 → Apprentice 3 has you wait 8 hours… but you’ve already done your reviews for the day, so instead of in 8 hours, you’d do them the next day. And if we assume you only do reviews once a day, you would wait 16 hours more than you’d absolutely have to for your reviews.

1 review session per day works for any other interval that’s not A1 → A2 and A2 → A3 and the time loss doesn’t hurt too poorly, but given that kanji come in two batches per level (still assuming you always 100% everything), that would be up to 32h time loss per level. More than a whole day extra.

Even if we aren’t that crazy here and give a bit more realism to it (not the whole 16 hours would be “wasted”, you’d also sleep, etc.) and assume you lose maybe 3 hours… That’s still 6 hours per level, which adds up to 60 hours in 10 levels and 360 hours - which are 15 days.

I’m not saying that’s a bad pace at all, of course. And I really don’t think it matters at all in the long run.

But I can’t see, mathematically speaking, how you could say that “max speed” is possibly with just one sitting per day. You’d get pretty close to the realistic max speed for sure, though.

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Do not sweat the speed. It’s all about comprehension and retention. Cut 2 or 3 usage sentence examples shown in usage section and paste them somewhere accessible. Read through the sentences aloud 2 to 3 times at 3 times a day for a total of 6 to 9 readings. This enforces sight recognition outside of the lessons in a structured manner. Plus you get the pronunciation and auditory memory, basically increasing the chance for recognition and retention. I got up to level 28 in 11 months, and realized I had hamstrung myself my by not using a wholistic ( まるごと) approach. Being back at 4 is pretty easy, however I can already tell that by taking a the long road, my 文法 is much stronger. When 200 to 300 review words come a day…you’ll wish you had paid more attention earlier…so don’t rush.

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You aren’t wrong, but isn’t margin of error of 2-3 months realistic? Not like you will need to aim for 368 days.

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Spot on Polv.

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Preach it!

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